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Touch to Make: An Index Finger’s Path into the Sculpture Factories in China
In spring of 2024, when green buds had already begun to appear even though light flurries were still falling in Rochester NY, I was slumped in the folding chair in my apartment, surrounded by dissertation books, the pigment tests, maquettes, and preliminary drawings for an upcoming exhibition in Beijing that October. Ever since I started graduate school, the gentle dilemma of being both an artist and a scholar has colored my days, as a tension that persists but always in the happiest ways. The room was quiet, the light soft, and my attention drifted between thinking, reading, and the pull of artwork I had not yet begun. Almost without intention, my finger moved across my phone, again, returning to the familiar drift of scrolling that has become an ordinary part of contemporary life. I opened Xiaohongshu (Red Note, the Chinese social media App) and typed four characters, sculpture factory (雕塑工厂, (read more...)
Doing Research Between Adolescence and Cyborgs
“What do you imagine when you hear the word “cyborg”?” This was the question posed by a teenager named Kauan to introduce a presentation on Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto (2009) for the research group of the High School Scientific Initiation Program at Unicamp. An online presentation, with slides, given by an undergraduate researcher, Kauan, to four classmates and a counselor. Immediately, the imagination of a robot comes to mind for some of us. Others are open to new references. We can travel through films, dystopias, machines, high-tech and even fashion can be a cyborg reference for teenagers. Apparently, cyborgs and adolescence have historically coexisted and have a love-hate relationship. Daily connected, their bodies inhabiting poorly demarcated boundaries between online and the offline. Humor and irony can simulate both the image of adolescence and the cyborg. We don’t have a problem with conflicting feelings, and we’re internalizing the contradiction of (read more...)
Renouncing and Returning to Shareholder Value
As pandemic restrictions began to ease in late 2021, the annual Finnish startup conference Slush made its return as an in-person event. Held for the first time in 2008, Slush grew through the 2010s to become a major international startup event with tens of thousands of attendees—a symbol of the “success story” of Finnish startup culture and a focus of national pride and economic hope. (more…) (read more...)